"Breeding-back" aims to restore or immitate extinct animals by selective breeding. This blog provides general information, the facts behind myths and news from various projects.

Monday, 4 January 2016

Post #200!

This is my
200th post. I have been blogging for two and a half years now, it has
been a lot of fun doing research, “field trips” and artworks for this blog. I
thought it was time to do a little retrospect on what I have published here so
far to give you an overview, also for readers that have not been following my
blog for so long but might be interested in some older articles.

I actually
intended to read and correct form and language, but unfortunately I don’t have
the time to do it thoroughly. Many of the pictures used in the posts became not
displayed at some point due to either a change of html or errors by blogger.
It’s annoying and I was not able nor had I the time to restore all of them. I
apologize.

My first
entries in May and June 2013 were rather modest. This post

The various breeding-back efforts provides a quick overview over the most important breeding-back attempts.
However, it should be a bit more comprehensive and I might do a new one one day.

This
article What is breeding-back all about?
introduces what breeding-back is about and what good there is in it. Note that
I used the word phenotype
synonymously with morphology and looks back then, which is imprecise. This term
actually describes everything that is expressed by the genotype and influenced
by environment, and therefore also includes factors such as behaviour.

Most post
on my blog, perhaps up to 80%, are about the aurochs. Not because I am
incredibly obsessed with this animal, but there is much more to write about.
Concerning the European wild horse, I covered everything I have references for
already unless new research delivers new data. Furthermore, there are no
breeding-back projects for this species, and also are not necessary because we
have breeds that already are what we want for the aurochs. For the quagga, I
already gathered and posted all info I have about the quagga itself as much as
the QP, but I keep on looking for new.

I have been
planning to do more species diversification here for long, but I think
everything we can say about the European wild ass and the European water
buffalo is said in my posts already, until new evidence shows up.

“Effigy
breed” is an attempt of mine to translate the German Abbildzüchtung as a
neutral term for the result of “breeding-back” (or in this case “effigy
breeding”) that does not acclaim to reconstruct the whole species/wild type. I
am not so happy with that term, which is why I don’t use it that often anymore.
The post is about if there is a relevant difference between the result of a
breeding-back attempt and a primitive landrace.

Quagga

The quagga and the Quagga Project
introduces the quagga and its evolutionary background and systematic position,
as well as the Quagga Project. I go into the project’s methods and in how far
the project’s zebras can resemble the quagga.

In this
entry, I review the argumentation of the quagga project and give my personal
opinion, i.e. that the quagga cannot be revived this way and that their zebras
should be called “Rau zebras” instead of “Rau quaggas”.

The name
“Tarpan” is a controversial and ambiguous one, and this post explains why. Nowadays
I try to avoid this problematic term.

What the Tarpan looked like
is a question that is not easy to answer, and I did a few weeks of research for
this post and illustration. It is based on contemporaneous written accounts and
scientific literature including modern genetic research.

The Tarpan that wasn't - the famous “Cherson Tarpan” which was photographed, a stallion of uncertain
identity.

This post
is on the Pleistocene wild horse skeleton from Denmark, and I compared its
skull to that of other horses and found that its skeleton seems to be identical
to that of a Przewalski’s horse, not so much that of a Sorraia. The pictures in
that post are gone, unfortunately.

The Sorraia - is it a wild/ancient horse?
In this entry, I took the arguments that Sorraia advocates use to give it a
wild horse status and confront it with data from genetic studies, bone material
and the breeds’ history, and draw my own conclusion on the nature of the
Sorraia horse.

I checked
my statement that the skulls of Sorraia horses are slim instead of robustly
built by having a look at the Denmark skull and comparing it with some Sorraia
heads. I came to the conclusion that the difference is not that big.

Back then,
the history of the Exmoor pony, especially as it is portrayed in Susan Baker’s
book, made me presume that there was a kind of “British primitive horse”, a
type or population of feral, primitive ponies that were once widespread in
Great Britain and formed the base of most British pony landraces. The Exmoor
pony would be the least diluted one, but is rather inbreed, so I suggested to
build up a second gene pool using land ponies bred to resemble it.

Is the Exmoor less special than we used to think?
A very interesting, down to earth publication from a few years ago put that
“British primitive horse” idea strongly into question, and the Exmoor pony is
seemingly not that special as we used to think.

I did a lot
research on pleiotropic effects, developtmental cascades and endocrinological
processes that might be related to domestication and the morphological changes
that it causes, mainly inspired by the Farm fox experiment. I also had a look
at feral populations of several species, especially the OVP Heck cattle, which
I used as a model. With all that, I developed a concept on dedomestication and
what implications it might have for breeding back. This concept, however, is on
empirically weak grounds, also because dedomestication is an under-studied,
neglected subject.

Markus
Bühler corrected me on some things I wrote about feral pigs in my DeDo-series.

Piebald deerare
interesting because they seemingly show the same mutations that cause the same
piebald patterns in domestic mammals.

Domestication can change diet in mammals presents a paper that found that dogs differ from wolves in a number of genes
involved in starch digestion and fat metabolism. Whether this is really caused
by artificial selection or if dogs might inherited that traits from wild
ancestors that differed from wolves already is a question treated in a separate
post on dog domestication.

Aurochs horns at Oostvaardersplassen
shows photos of Heck cattle at OVP that display an aurochs-like horn shape with
an inwards-curve more strongly and elegantly expressed than in any Heck cattle
outside the reserve. If it is a real trend, it is probably due to selective
pressure for mechanically useful horns in intraspecific combats. Interestingly,
only cows have truly inwards-curving horns yet it seems.

The
extremely low genetic diversity in the gene pool of the wisent is a
life-threatening danger for the whole species. In this entry I suggest that
cloning ancient wisent from ancient DNA would greatly increase the genetic
diversity and therefore greatly improve the health of the species.

Hybridization
is damned in species conservation, while over-purebreeding is enhancing inbreeding
depression. In this article, I defend the Wisent population in the Caucasus and
suggest to set up a third breeding like for wisents with controlled, planned
American bison introgression. Also I propose that additional research should be
done.

I consider
the Wisent population in the Caucasus an important one, and you can donate for
them on the link I provide in this post.

Is the wolf a domesticated dog or something different?
I did some research on dog domestication, and the origin of the domestic dog
might differ a little from the traditional scenario. It was one of those
article that were fun to do because I had to dig through a lot of literature
and it became rather long.

In 2013 I
met with Walter Frisch, the creator of the Wörth/Steinberg line (Heck cattle
special for sometimes superb horns and comparably stable) and took a look at
his herd. It was very nice, and the post includes a lot of photos.

5 comments:

Congrats! Your next assignment: high time to write something about the repurcussions of the completed aurochs-genome. For instance in the summary I read something about modern british and irish breeds having more in common with the aurochs than other breeds.

About this blog

This blog is on everything related to the so-called “breeding-back” of extinct animals: From the extinct animals themselves, over their often domestic descendants and dedomestication to news and facts about various breeding-back projects, reports and photos from my own breeding-back related trips. I try to have a balanced and fact-based approach to this subject and to dismantle many of the popular myths. Enjoy!

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About me

My major interest always have been extinct animals, from dinosaurs to Pleistocene megafauna and more recent extinctions. Besides that I am interested in evolution, genetics and ecology.
I am also an amateur animal artist, making drawings and models mostly of extinct animals.